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In April, 1833, Sheriff James Herndon of Clark County presented a sale, printed in the Southern Banner newspaper, designated to occur the following month. Within his announcement, he introduced his sale of property, and then he listed three groups of property that he planned to sell. His first set only contained slaves: Milley, age 22, her two children, Mary, age five, Henry, age three or four, and...

There were always fears of slave rebellions. In a letter dated October 13th, 1849, from E.W. Cooper, Thomas Cassels Law learned of a Negro insurrection in his home district of Darlington, South Carolina. Cooper served on an investigating committee to respond to the matter. Although they could not gather sufficient evidence to have the four leading insurrectionists hanged, they were lodged in jail and...

Enticing a willing buyer to purchase a slave was not easy. But there were characteristics that Norton and Steele dramatically emphasized to gain interest in the slaves they wanted to sell. They offered young boys and girls who were desirable, because they are smart and 'copper coloured' and also posses other skills like being good nurses. Choosing to find a willing buyer through the newspaper, they...

In the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the opinion of the court, concluding that people of African decent, whether or not they were bound by slavery or free, could never become citizens of the United States and furthermore, that Congress had no right to create or administer territories. It was also the opinion of the Court that the Constitution could...

Charles Seton was still waiting for payment after the court ordered Eleazar Waterman to pay Seton for a loan and after he filed two petitions to the court to speed up the process. Waterman was in debt to Charles Seton for a couple of years. On June 11, 1823, the Superior Court of East Florida ordered the sheriff, James R. Hankam, to sell the slaves that belonged to Waterman. The slaves were supposed...

Even the romantic lives of slaves fell under the authority of white masters. Slaves, being the property of their masters, couldn't just freely marry at their heart's desire. There was a standard protocol. In his biographical narrative, Allen Parker recounted how the process would likely unfold on a plantation in Chowan County, North Carolina. If a male slave wanted to marry a woman from another plantation,...

As George Gillet Keen would have told you himself, he was a man of few words. He wanted niggers. In particular, he wanted the ability to hire an overseer, to raise himself to a higher class distinction. Some of his hunting buddies had overseers, and their constant dialogue about plantation life left Keen on the outside. He wanted nothing more in life than a plantation of niggers so I could talk about...

Sometime prior to the first of January 1836, slaveholder Thomas Fuller must have checked his books or given some thought to his economic needs. Perhaps he wanted to make some money, maybe he was in debt and needed to get cash to pay back a lender, or he may have been foreclosing on a loan. All of these were common reasons for selling slaves in the South. Or, maybe Fuller was just trying to get certain...

It was 1825, and strange happenings were occurring around the house of Dr. John McChesney in Augusta County, Virginia. According to the Annals of Augusta County, a historical record of the County, it all had started when Maria, one of Dr. McChesney's enslaved children, came to dinner one night very much frightened, apparently having been chased by an old woman with her head tied up. Soon after, stones...

A black enslaved man named Henry ran away from the Staunton, Virginia plantation of John G. Wright on the 14th of June, 1815. By August 7th , Mr. Wright had placed an advertisement of a twenty dollar reward for his capture and return in the Washington D.C. Daily National Intelligencer. This was Henry's second attempt at escape; he had made the first while owned by a Doctor Trent in Richmond. Henry...